The Four Color Media Monitor

Forbes reports the artist Mike Mignola is launching yet another horror thriller, Bowling With Corpses:

After three decades of captivating comic book customers with the exploits of Anung Un Rama — otherwise known as Hellboy – Mike Mignola is trying something new.

That something new is Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (now on sale from Dark Horse Comics), a collection of deliciously macabre stories loosely inspired by folklore found ‘round the world. It’s a place where Mignola can “do a story based on a Japanese story” and “have it feel Japanese without taking place in a real Japan,” the celebrated author-illustrator tells me over email.

The only yarn not subject to Mignola’s re-interpretation is the one that gives the book its name. “Some years ago, I stumbled across this Italian folktale about a kid who went bowling with corpses and fell in love with it,” he recalls. “So I finally sat down to create this whole world — the idea being that I’d create something like our real world where I could set all my stories. I fell in love with the world-building, ending up with maps of the world, a mythology, and creation myth for the place. And rather than adapt stories (other than the story Bowling with Corpses), the other stories in the collection just grew out of the world I’d created.”

He continues: “It’s hard to pick [a favorite] story, as I view the whole book as one big teaser for this new world. If I had to pick, it would probably have to be the title story, as it’s what started the whole ball rolling — and I do love the kid with the magic mummified hand. I want to tell more stories about him.”

In a way, the entirety of the Hellboy mythos — which steadily draws from mythology, folklore, and classic horror fiction — has been a proof of concept for Corpses, which features colors by Dave Stewart and letters by Clem Robins. But while Big Red occupies what is “still meant to be more or less the our real world,” Mignola explains, this anthology inhabits a completely fantastical reality, one full of “sea dragons” and “giant public temples built in the name of and giant public temples to a hundred different gods. This new world is a fun one to build and play around in.”

Gee, if this builds as much on horror components as Hellboy did, what's so new? All Mignola's doing is sticking with the darkness, failing to prove he can take a change of pace for the brighter and more optimistic. And if he must keep telling dark tales, it's hypocritical how artists and writers like him won't take on serious real life issues like Islamic terrorism. It's been clear for a long time that when it comes to real life issues like those, the advocates of darkness grind to a screeching halt.

If Mignola really wants to prove he's creative, he'll take the challenge of developing a story that's in brighter territory, and even comedic without being gross. For now, he isn't turning out anything new. Just more of the same horror-themed mishmash.

Labels: Europe and Asia, indie publishers, msm propaganda, violence

IGN's writing apologia for Diamond Distribution, which as previously reported is filing for Chapter 11 due to bankruptcy:

So what exactly is going on with Diamond right now? The gist is that Diamond was, until relatively recently, the only major distributor of monthly comics in the US. The company had a de facto monopoly on the market, to the point that the Justice Department opened an investigation back in 1997 (one it ultimately closed without pursuing further action). To their credit, Diamond helped the industry survive and eventually thrive again after the dark days of the mid-’90s comic book crash, but they’ve also been steadily criticized over the years for substandard customer service and a failure to innovate.

You could also say the same thing about Marvel/DC in modern times. They certainly failed to prove entertaining without being alienating, and abandoned good taste to boot.

While many of these publishers still sub-distribute through Diamond (meaning comic shops can order through Diamond if they prefer), the number of publishers exclusive to Diamond has steadily dwindled over the past several years. Their biggest exclusives remaining include Dynamite Entertainment, DSTLRY, Valiant Entertainment, and Archie Comics.

Unsurprisingly, Diamond - a company already battered by the COVID-19 pandemic - has struggled to deal with the loss of so much revenue. Late last year, they closed their Plattsburgh, New York, warehouse, thereby consolidating their entire operation to a single warehouse. In recent weeks, many comic shop owners have voiced complaints about late deliveries, suggesting Diamond is struggling to keep up with demand and fulfill orders. And now we come to this.

Well how come nobody took issue with how one company monopolized the landscape, and didn't encourage others be established, or that publishers try to change their format and approach to printing and marketing? If they don't want to "upset the applecart", they have only themselves to blame for painting themselves into a corner. And if they won't complain about the dire state of artistic quality in modern comicdom, that's another reason why sales have fallen, to the point where even Diamond won't make much money from the mainstream.

Again, Diamond isn’t necessarily fading away into the ether just yet, but should the company ultimately fold, the consequences could be pretty dire for the industry. Neither Penguin Random House nor Lunar have shown much interest in catering to smaller publishers, meaning the Archies and Dynamites of the industry could be left with no means of distribution. Where do they go from there? Do they try to find alternate avenues or pivot to a digital-only business model? Is the digital market enough to sustain these publishers on its own? And what about the many creators and editors who depend on those publishers for their livelihood or their first big break?

Wow, we're supposed to care about a publisher that turned to woke pandering nearly 15 years ago? Even Dynamite went that route to some extent. If Archie collapses, it'll be their fault too, because who wants their children to read heavy-handed leftist ideology?

Diamond may no longer be the monopolistic force it once was, but it’s still an important one. It’s especially crucial to many comic shops as a source for buying collectibles and action figures. Those items tend to have much higher profit margins than comic books, which is why so many comic shops in recent years have pivoted to wall-to-wall Funko Pop! displays. Those toys pay the bills, and Diamond was the best outlet for acquiring them. Diamond Select Toys itself is one of the last companies targeting the more affordable end of the collectibles market, so it would be a real shame if they didn’t survive this situation.

If Diamond goes under, a lot of publishers and comic shops are going to be dragged down in the wake. That would in turn have ripple effects that even the larger publishers would feel. Again, PRH is Diamond’s single biggest creditor. According to ICv2’s Rob Salkowitz, the $9.2 million debt represents several years’ worth of profit for PRH. Now the biggest force in comics distribution in the US, how much would a total write-off of that debt affect PRH? How does that in turn affect big guns like Marvel and Boom? At the very least, a massive write-off would make PRH much more risk-averse and even less likely to take on the publishers left out in the cold by Diamond.

I should think there's dozens of distributors who could handle toy merchandise with discounts available, and if it's really hard to sell comics now, maybe they should just run a toy store. I certainly can't understand why anybody's expected to sell pamphlet comics, that's for sure. Another topic never explored by these propagandists.

All of this fear and uncertainty comes at a time when the industry already has plenty of both to spare. While 2024 had several very successful launches, from DC’s Absolute Universe to IDW’s star-studded TMNT relaunch, overall graphic novel sales were down 11.4% last year (despite the book market in general holding fairly steady).

If they're going to sugarcoat Jason Aaron's writing, I'm not sure what they're talking about. This also fails to consider IDW really brought themselves down to an abyss with their woke pandering and marketing, and I'd strongly recommend any independent creators part ways with them at this point.

That’s to say nothing of fears over the potential impact of the Trump administration’s proposed tariffs. American comics are largely printed in Canada, and a 25% tariff would force major price hikes across the board. $4.99 is rapidly becoming the new standard cover price for monthly comics. Will increasingly cash-strapped readers put up with a $6 or $7 cover price for a 20-page comic? At what point do people become priced out of the hobby entirely?

Why won't they ask if readers would be more comfortable buying a paperback/hardcover comic with a few hundred pages? This sure is cheap and provokes no thought at all. And the claim comics are "largely printed in Canada" is hugely exaggerated, since according to this list on LinkedIn, there are printing companies for comics in the USA, like PrintingCenterUSA, Greko and PrintNinja, and they do offer decent prices for the job. So the above is just an anti-Trump smear, which they apparently see as better than complaining why USA industry doesn't try to make its services more affordable, to say nothing of how Marvel/DC don't try to make their comics more entertaining again without vicious leftism stuffed in.

It's clear IGN's writer is not interested in encouraging the industry to better itself, artistically, businesswise, or otherwise. He wasted several paragraphs for this laughable puff piece that only excuses all the guilty parties in the downfall of comicdom that really went into hyperspeed post-2000, and the continued refusal to do so is exactly why the industry will collapse, with or without Diamond.

Labels: Archie, dc comics, indie publishers, licensed products, marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics, sales

Superhero Hype announced that Dynamite Entertainment's launching a new take on the old Capt. Planet and the Planeteers cartoon from the early 90s, which was an early example of political/environmental propaganda for its time, and is written by a scribe who may have once worked as a specialty news journalist:

Running for six seasons, Captain Planet and the Planeteers was notable among superhero cartoons of the 1990s. While most children’s programming of the era was focused on selling toys, Captain Planet promoted environmental awareness and activism. Earth’s Greatest Champion offered viewers tips on how they could help save the world in small ways, advising viewers that “the power is yours!” Now, Dynamite Entertainment is updating the series in a new monthly comic.

The new series will be written by writer David Pepose, best known for his work on 2024’s Space Ghost reboot. Pepose is joined by Vampirella artist Eman Casallos, who will provide the comic’s interiors. Dynamite has also confirmed covers by Mark Spears, Christian Ward, and Ben Oliver for the first issue. Additionally, Jae Lee and June Chung will produce a series of interconnecting covers for the series’ first six issues.

Their idea of reflecting modern sensibilities is to draw Capt. Planet with a beard, rather than a mullet. It also says:

The series will feature the same five Planeteers as the original Captain Planet cartoon. However, the comic will denote their specific nationalities, rather than describing them as being from Africa, Asia, North America, or South America. The comic will also reportedly see emotional arcs for each of the Planeteers as they overcome personal issues to work together for a better tomorrow.

Well if it emphasizes their nationalities and local cultures like food recipes, that can be getting somewhere, seeing how the most woke products stuck tightly to superficial components like skin color and LGBT ideology. But that part about "better tomorrow" reeks too much of the alterations DC is making to Superman's slogan, and it's not pleasing at all. Mainly because, as this fawning Newsarama report says:

Lucian Plunder seems to be the updated version of original villain Lootin Plunder, whose name is of course a play on "loot and plunder," his favorite things to do as a cartoonishly evil capitalist.

Gee, if that's the direction they intend to impose upon this new adaptation, then they clearly aren't interested in exploring whether socialists are capable of evils. So what good does it do to adapt this old cartoon if they won't move beyond any cliches it embodied? It's just another excuse to follow the woke playbook of the modern leftist era then.

Labels: animation, history, indie publishers, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics

Here's some more op-eds about the Neil Gaiman sexual assault scandal. For example, from the UK Observer/Guardian:

Perhaps uniquely in the history of #MeToo, the women now alleging sexual misconduct on the part of the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman would appear to have their alleged perpetrator’s full support. Back when this movement seemed full of potential, in 2018, Gaiman urged the public to believe women like Christine Blasey Ford, whose allegations of sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh were then being trashed. [...]

“We must fight,” Gaiman’s 2018 pro-survivor declaration continued, “alongside them, for them to be believed, at the ballot box & with art & by listening, and change this world for the better.”

Sounds like this was more a political statement for elections than an actual protest against misogyny. And as far as I know, the accusations against Kavanaugh were trumped up, yet Joe Biden by contrast was ignored, and Gaiman clearly wasn't interested either. Nor does the Observer seem particularly interested in making a point about all that.

As with art, so with a despised celebrity’s tweets: the content is sometimes separable from the man. The languid response to the opening Tortoise Media investigation, Master: the allegations against Neil Gaiman, last July, confirms how hard it remains for low-profile, non-glamorous accusers to be believed, regardless of successive, cautionary reports involving, for instance, Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew and Gaiman’s fellow New Statesman guest editor, the disgraced Russell Brand.

The first accusations about Gaiman, detailed by Tortoise, were stolidly, even reluctantly received. Gaiman “strongly denied” allegations by two women of non-consensual sex. Some film adaptations were suspended. A new dramatisation of his children’s book, Coraline, due to open this year, was not. He kept his publishers and five honorary degrees. Even last week, when the US journalist Lila Shapiro detailed a spectrum of alleged behaviour featuring what reads, at best, like BDSM gone hideously wrong, more grimly, like concerning behaviour in the presence of a child, headlines focused repeatedly on Gaiman’s denials. If that sounds like appropriate caution, compare with the old Weinstein reports, or domestically, with the consternation when, for instance, the highly regarded writer Daisy Goodwin alleged that a Tory, Daniel Korski, once touched her breast. After horrified reports focused on her experience, as opposed to Korski’s denial, he withdrew his candidacy for mayor of London.

If, for headline writers, Korski could hardly match Gaiman for ostentatious virtue, well, nor did his claimed offence come close to what is alleged about the writer. From reports in which Gaiman’s denials loom as large as multiple women’s detailed accusations, it’s confirmed that rule number one, for a powerful married man interested in exploitative recreational sex with manipulable young women is: recruit from the isolated and obscure. Snag a babysitter, a fan, someone vulnerable. Learn, from, say, John le Carré, Cormac McCarthy: both appear widely forgiven, even sneakingly admired, for getting away with it. Gaiman’s rebuttal has been respectfully quoted, as if his denial of “non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever”, does not leave much else unaccounted for. While, with BDSM in the picture, there is room for confusion about consent, this leaves open many other allegations, including a child’s possible awareness of aspects of this hobby. A nanny says she was ordered by Gaiman’s son to “call him ‘Master’”.

For Gaiman’s superfans, unwilling to think badly of a writer they love, over and above his creative talent, for returning their interest, for his care for the marginalised, for being an LGBTQ+ ally, for being progressive on practically everything, difficulty in adjusting to a creepy, cruel-sounding Gaiman is more understandable. For some fans it should not have counted by way of mitigation, but evidently did, that one of the Tortoise journalists is Rachel Johnson, the former prime minister’s sister and his ardent supporter.

Gaiman’s claim to the opposite standing, as a trusted progressive authority, actually does make his alleged misconduct more reprehensible than a standard big shot’s. Harvey Weinstein never posed as a feminist; you didn’t hear Mohamed Al Fayed say things like (Gaiman’s) “why can’t we all be nice to each other”, or not in public. Neil “call me Master” Gaiman is not just any wealthy man who has won extraordinary access to extremely young women; the women were likely to be dazzled precisely because, with his former wife, Amanda Palmer, he represented – as an Observer piece once said – “geek royalty”.

Which less easily explains the pause while Gaiman’s older associates, collaborators and friends silently reconcile the dashing feminist with the disgusting person eight women describe. Two eminent friends are reportedly “processing” the reports. Is it that complicated? As the writer Jeff VanderMeer commented on Bluesky: “‘Neil Gaiman’s my friend. I have to process my feelings.’ Barf.”

Well this suggests that, when the offender is a liberal like Gaiman happens to be, the left still sees it as far less of a concern, even selectively, seeing how Weinstein went down, but Gaiman so far has all but gotten away with his offenses. Something the ostensibly worried would do well to process to boot - is there anything wrong with liberal ideologies? Speaking of which:

Few professionals, these days, are more careful than UK and US publishers not to hurt feelings or to cause offence, even if it leads to accusations of censorship: last week The Bookseller was unable to elicit any response from Gaiman’s. Maybe Bloomsbury will continue to publish his children’s book What You Need to be Warm, written as a goodwill ambassador for the UNHCR: “It is about our right to feel safe, whoever we are and wherever we are from.”

Oh, so that book was written for the sake of a movement as awful as the UN and its agencies happen to be. Which only compounds quite a bit of what's wrong with Gaiman. He made things so much less safe, like quite a few of his colleagues at the UN agency he worked for. One can only wonder at this point if any refugees were victimized by Gaiman during his time in their employment.

Here's another from the UK Guardian, which says:

Take the story told by Scarlett Pavlovich. Even unconventional people end up needing conventional things such as childcare, which Gaiman and his ex-wife Amanda Palmer seem to have decided was best obtained by asking women who were also fans. Aged 24, Pavlovich has arrived for her first day of work at Gaiman’s – he is 61 – to discover the child is in fact on a playdate. She has only known the author for a couple of hours when he suggests she takes a bath in his outdoor tub while he’s on a work call. Minutes after, he appears naked, and joins her, swiftly beginning to stroke her feet. According to the New York Magazine report, she tells him “she was gay, she’d never had sex, she had been sexually abused by a 45-year-old man when she was 15. Gaiman continued to press.” Indeed, he does so to the point of anal penetration. “Then he asked if he could come on my face, and I said ‘no’ but he did anyway. He said, ‘Call me “master”, and I’ll come.’ He said, ‘Be a good girl. You’re a good little girl.’” She goes home to Google #MeToo and Neil Gaiman. Yet in time, she also goes back to Gaiman and Palmer’s houses. And months later, a vulnerable young adult without a home and estranged from her own family, she is still stuck in this toxic cycle. And has still never been paid for all the childcare.

In our era, people have righteously debunked the myth of the perfect victim – but less so the myth of the perfect perpetrator. The perfect perpetrator is an evil stranger – yet sexual abuse is overwhelmingly likely to be carried out by someone you know, who you may be related to or in a relationship with, and who is pretty nice to you some of the time. These are complex and inconvenient truths, but they are truths.

Furthermore, there are perfect perpetrators in the public imagination. Harvey Weinstein, once he was exposed, was the perfect perpetrator. Physically repulsive – hey, it is what it is – and not actually famous in the world outside his professional community, he was the kind of 2D scumbag no civilian could possibly be invested in. People in the normal world will always be incalculably more relaxed about the exposure of a movie producer, a job they instinctively regard as commoditised, than they will be about losing any kind of artist, a job whose works have affected them over the course of many years. Perhaps this is why many fans of the master storyteller Neil Gaiman are refusing to listen to the less appealing, less magical accounts of those women who allege he took advantage of them.

Something eyebrow raising about what Gaiman did is that he abused a lesbian. Which could explain why he wrote one as nothing more than a plot device in issue 6 of the Sandman series, one of the most excruciatingly gruesome moments in the book. Or, as a character who amounted to nothing more than tissue paper, to be used for wiping the nose, then submitted to the wastebasket. And what kind of audience did he acquire that would be so easy with such atrocities? The people who watched Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street?

Here's another op-ed from Mid-Day:

What is the right response to the revelations that a powerful man is a perv like unimportant ones, and uses his wealth to silence his victims and others too? You’d have to be depraved to ask. We are pained, horrified, sickened. And of course, betrayed.

Public shaming brings its share of trauma no matter who you are. But, there is no substantive loss of power for Gaiman. We will move on to a new icon. Same rapture, different guy.

Accounts of celebrity sexual predators follow a format. Methodically detailed crimes whose tone of forensic detachment gives them political significance, setting them apart from tabloid salaciousness. They are made to sound exceptional, because the person they are about is exceptional and because they may be in a respectable magazine, not Manohar Kahaniyan. Someone will always be quoted as saying “I knew he cheated but never imagined it could be non-consensual.” That’s right—because we have no proof from the last decades that powerful, charismatic men are routinely non-consensual. Because who wouldn’t want to be with that iconic man na?

It is not their artistry that makes these artists exceptional but the act of conversion where success anoints them as celebrities. The essay on Gaiman talks about how comic book conventions he featured in have a particularly vulnerable fandom, subsuming itself to a Papa icon. But is this process limited to those fandoms?

The relationship with these figures is continuously mediated by a fawning media culture —social media is an extension of it. A whole cultural complex of “quotes”, as if passages from the Bible, exists to convert the celebrity into a cult figure, gleaming with moral certitude. We share those quotes to establish our membership in this moral cult. Most ecstatically self-declared bell hooks fans, a particular internet species, have mostly read her quotes or perhaps the one book—All About Love.

Of course it's not just comicdom that can be vulnerable. Even movie and music fandoms can fall prey to these dangerous facades. Wasn't Bill Cosby once unwisely revered as a supposedly great role model until it turned out he wasn't? What's needed is vigilance even when it comes to celebrities, and writers who can say they hope various celebrities will retain some moral integrity and keep their flaws to a minimum so we can appreciate their resumes for years to come, and their writings and performances will hold up far better for a long time. The time's come to call for more responsibility on the part of performers.

Now here's one from Unherd's editor, Kathleen Stock, about why BDSM is dangerous, and at the end:

To be clear: this couldn’t work as a legal argument, and nor is it an attempt to adjudicate Gaiman’s guilt or innocence. But it is certainly an argument against getting involved in sadomasochism in general. More often than not, it is very bad for the submissive in the scenario — not just because it leads her to physically dangerous situations, but also because it tends to put her in a state of mind in which agency is undermined and subsequent choices aren’t those of her true self, however confidently things started out. Meanwhile, for the sadist — and especially the famous one, as Gaiman has discovered — it leaves your good reputation a hostage to fortune, hoping that those with whom you had degrading sex in the past never properly get to know their own minds.

Whatever "good" reputation Gaiman had was undeserved, and this whole scandal should serve as a lesson why BDSM only gives sex a bad name. No sane person should practice it.

We could also take a look at what Polygon is telling about the reaction on Reddit to the scandal, as the news sends the posters into feelings of devastation:

Overwhelmed by the influx of comments, the r/NeilGaiman mods initially shut down conversations about the allegations. Another subreddit, r/NeilGaimanUncovered, formed to “raise awareness of the allegations against Neil Gaiman and promote accountability processes for him and others like him.” The r/NeilGaiman facilitators quickly changed their policy. “I think we collectively realized that we can’t bury our heads in the sand,” says nineteendoors. “The allegations are what they are, and we can’t quell discussion of them. It’s something we have to actively engage with.”

The community had settled into a new norm, with more mods facilitating the increased engagement, when New York Magazine published its in-depth investigation. “[Monday] was an extremely bad day to be on Reddit,” says nineteendoors. “The last couple of days have just been this endless flood of people grieving, and then of people coming in and saying, ‘But they’re just allegations.’” One comment she removed claimed the “public outcries are because most of [Gaiman’s] fans are women, and this is what you get when you have women for fans.”

Of course it was never just women who were fans of this overrated creep. Plenty of men were too. What is incomprehensible is how nobody could see the writing on the wall, or noticed how as time went by, his stories became increasingly contrived and forced, like the 1602 miniseries and the Eternals miniseries. And there were questionable allusions to racial topics in some of his tales too. As I realize, his audience was regrettably one that couldn't care less about the wider DCU/MCU and its casts, which could explain why no complaints about the maltreatment of Lyta Hall. Perhaps now, after all these years, somebody might want to make the case it's time to right a wrong when it comes to Roy Thomas' creations as much as any other decent veterans' from decades past?

Splice Today says we can't save Gaiman's reputation and career, nor does he deserve it, but they take a questionable turn when they say:

The scandal has a lot of implications for Gaiman’s future life and career. Some of are trivial, unless you are Gaiman; others are works in progress, their outcomes uncertain. One thing, however, is clear. Gaiman will not be serving jail time, paying fines, or suffering other legal repercussions for his indiscretions. That’s good, because most of the allegations describe him acting in ways that are unseemly, even shocking, but not explicitly against the law.

While he may sadly never go to prison, that doesn't mean he shouldn't. What's offensive about his behavior is that, in at least a few cases, he lured women into seemingly consensual relations, then afterwards, he began to cross red lines. And his endangerment of child welfare, to use a legal term for such a monstrosity, is something that demands he be kept away from children as much as women of any age. And then, wouldn't you know it, the article turns into a pathetic excuse for a Trump-bashing moment:

The sordid history of Gaiman’s love affairs is a story that could only center around a rich, famous, creatively-gifted man. It would be different for a woman, obviously. But it would be different, as well, for someone who couldn’t pay a suborned housekeeper to sign a nondisclosure agreement, or couldn’t send angry ex-lovers hush money “to be used for therapy.” It would be different for someone without the power to awe and intimidate everyone around them with magical texts they alone know how to summon from the void. Reducing Gaiman to a symbol of male privilege, male aggression, feckless wealth—or even duplicitous feminism—is a mistake. There are predators, like Donald Trump, who we (collectively) treat as if they’re too big to fail, no matter what they’ve done wrong. There are also cruel, self-deluded men of no importance who abuse women. Naturally, their lovers have stories and scars, but those traumas will never come to light because outing anonymous bastards doesn’t pay.

Ahem. Trump may have talked dirty, but did he do anything physically dirty? If not, then this is pathetically cheap, considering Gaiman reportedly did commit physical crimes by sharp contrast. At least they make an interesting point with the following:

We’re not witnessing, by watching Gaiman tumble, the ouster of a duplicitous feminist from a chastened industry that has grown wise at last. I say this because feminism doesn’t live on social media sites where you can impress people with chatty, one-sentence posts about the “fact” of the patriarchy. Feminism isn’t built around pandering stories about women with exceptional abilities and sassy wits. Feminism ought to be, for someone like Gaiman, the internal struggle to live up to the values of a powerful, persistent movement that elevates all of us. But we gave him another option, a tempting one: we let him stand there while we projected all our feminist hopes onto his inoffensive mug shots. We pretended that books like Coraline were feminist books because they had brave female protagonists. They also had hysterical, oppressive “mother” characters, but we didn’t worry too much about that. After all, he was clearly doing the right thing. His heart was in the right place. Or was it?

Nope. When somebody belittles motherhood to the point of making it look like they're bad for a daughter, that's a contradiction of feminism right there, along with respect for womanhood. I know stepmothers have gotten a bad image in some fiction stories (and even the Parent Trap/Lisa and Lottie by Erich Kastner was similar in this sense), but if Gaiman was making even biological moms look bad, that's taking the stereotype to a whole new level. Ugh.

Then, the UK Spectator's Julie Birchill, who once met Gaiman in the late 80s at a club, gave her view of the disturbing revelations:

One of the worst ways to form a good first impression of someone is when they’re chasing the same woman as you, so in the interests of total clarity I’ll divulge that the first – and only – time I met Neil Gaiman was way back in the twentieth century, at the Groucho Club, when we were both after the late Kathy Acker. (I wanted to hurl when he called her ‘Tweetie Pie’.)

I’ll tell my Acker story first because it’s a funny one. That Christmas she was a guest at a lunch at my bohemian in-laws. My second husband’s mother had failed to turn the stove on, thanks to an even greater cannabis fog than usual, and so lunch wasn’t served until dusk. As the afternoon wore on, and the brandy and Babycham ran out, I began to feel…warmly, shall we say, towards Miss Acker. To cut a long story short, my second husband was not best pleased when he found us playing tonsil-tennis upstairs in the marital bedroom. My putative paramour was cast out into the night; she was the lucky one, I reflected as I took a second helping of thoroughly nuked turkey as penance.

Anyway, Gaiman. For ages I thought of him as ‘that creepy bloke who fancies Tweetie Pie’ but then suddenly he was everywhere with his daft ‘fantasy’ stories. I’m damned if I’m going to write about his ‘work’, specifically as I haven’t read it in principle, but my husband Mr Raven, something of a ‘graphic novel’ fan informs me that:

‘If you’re looking for early perve signs you could hardly do better than his story ‘Calliope’ from issue 17 of The Sandman. It’s about a successful writer (books, screenplays etc., just like Neil!) with a dark secret: he owes all his success to the fact that he’s keeping the muse Calliope prisoner in his basement, and raping her every time he needs inspiration.’

The level of Gaiman’s success can be painlessly understood by the amount of awards he’s won during his career; I counted 80, and I’m not sure that this is even the full list.

And now he’s a shoo-in for the Bad Feminist Award, inaugurated by no less than Harvey Weinstein. Last year, this life-long ‘ally’ of women was alleged by five young women interviewed on the Tortoise Media podcast ‘Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman’ as a sexual abuser, sexual assaulter and rapist. Though these are as yet purely allegations, all of them shared a similar insight; that this weedy little intellectual geek was in fact a sadist, taking delight in subjecting girls to painful sex they neither ‘wanted nor enjoyed’ as one of them put it. I won’t go into the gory details here, but forcing one of them to eat their own vomit is one of the tamer tales.

So he took a creepy approach to a woman she knew way back when. And, most unfortunately, went on to rake up a whole shipload of awards for some of the most overrated tripe on the market. I do have to wonder about the following though:

The problem here is bigger and more interesting than Gaiman himself. (What isn’t?) Women involved in the gamer/geek sub-culture have reported many times how, thinking that their own ‘nerdiness’ will make them welcome in these offbeat, online communities, immediately get hit on and subsequently insulted quicker than by a pub-full of Millwall fans when they do not respond sexually. It’s that men who were ‘geeky’ at school believe that they can never become bullies – or indeed become bad.

There is an element of bitterness about the memory of all those girls at school who preferred the tough, attractive boys – also a massive driver of incels generally. If geeks manage to make it in the real world, the bodies of women become their ‘reward’, their somewhat sickening ‘treat’ to themselves. We’re taught that traditionally masculine men are the enemies of feminism, but – as the kind of men who have supported real women and the kind who have supported transvestites in the Toilet Wars shows – I’d bet on a geek being more misogynistic than a jock any day.

Well, I'm sure there are, most unfortunately, "geeks" whose understanding of how to interact with the fairer sex is very poor. But it would be wrong to say all are like that (and the use of the slang "incel" is something leftists may have concocted, so I wouldn't recommend somebody I assume is conservative use it). Gaiman, on the other hand, certainly gives geeks a bad name, along with counterculture, which I'm sure he was pandering to as well, for all the wrong reasons. All that aside, at least she acknowledges traditionally masculine men may have defended women's dignity in case of the transsexual invasion of women's private spaces. And that's counting for something. As for lady nerds, is Birchill implying they expect to be treated as men, and don't want to date men, nerdy or otherwise, at all? Well that'd have to be the weirdest news I've heard all day.

One more item of interest from the UK Times is the news that a professor who once bestowed an award to Gaiman is now calling for revoking all awards given to him in the past:

Neil Gaiman must be stripped of his academic titles if the “horrifying” allegations made against him are substantiated, the professor who presented him with a honorary doctorate has said.

[...] Gaiman, who has won awards for his scripts for Doctor Who and appeared as himself in The Simpsons, was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters at St Andrews in 2016.

Dr Chris Jones, now professor of English at the University of Utah, who presented the honour, believes it should be rescinded if the claims are found to have substance.

“I am shocked and horrified at the allegations that have been emerging in the news recently,” he said. “I presume these allegations will be rigorously investigated.

“If they are substantiated, and I have no reason to doubt the testimony of the women who have been brave enough to come forward, then I do think it appropriate that any institution which has given Gaiman an honour in the past, including the University of St Andrews, rescind that honour.”

Stressing he was speaking in a personal capacity he added: “My thoughts are with the victims of abuse and sexual assault everywhere.”

Nine years earlier Jones delivered a speech where he praised Gaiman for championing “strong female characters”, adding: “He knows that young readers have fears that they need to confront and that transitioning into the imaginative world of adulthood requires the kind of intellectual nourishment that is found in the often terrifying realm of the original, unsanitised fairy tales.”

I just don't understand how, if we refer to the Sandman series, nobody could see the contempt Gaiman had for Lyta. Why, even Calliope wasn't particularly written well as a guest character. Come to think of it, nobody came off very well there under Gaiman's overrated scripting. And there were the leftist political allusions present there as well, which I've guessed had something to do with the positive reception he originally got. If a right-wing writer was passed over for the sake of men like Gaiman, that's a problem that needs repairing. Maybe the recinded awards should go to deserving conservatives instead.

Labels: history, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, violence

There's former fans of the disgraced Gaiman who sure made pretty peculiar moves in their admiration of pop culture, and according to this Rolling Stone article on Yahoo, some are having Buyer's Remorse about getting tattoos inspired by Gaiman's resume:

...for millions of fans, it will be impossible to see Gaiman as they once did, and this is perhaps hardest for the people who expressed their admiration in the indelible form of a tattoo.

As one reader with a tattoo inspired by Gaiman’s dark fantasy novella Coraline put it on X, formerly Twitter: “The continuous neil gaiman news is devastating to me and genuinely makes me want to cut my skin off. i got this tattoo months and months before his allegations and as a lesbian sexual assault victim having something he created on me makes me ill. why are people so evil???” The post includes a photo of the large ink work, which covers their entire forearm. In a 2023 post on the platform, another fan, showing off an arm tat of a character from Gaiman’s comic The Sandman, wrote, “First thing I did when I got it was text my friend ‘Neil Gaiman better not ever turn out to be a creep,’ lol” — as if to predict the very fallout the writer’s most devoted readers are now facing.

A tattoo artist, meanwhile, wrote on X, “I personally never got into Gaiman’s work, but I have tattooed a LOT of things based on it for clients. It feels like a good reminder that ANY fandom tattoo you get runs the risk of being spoiled by the creators doing heinous things, even if you think ‘it could never be them.'” (Indeed, the allegations against Gaiman have been devastating for his community in part because of the perceived feminist themes of his books.)

Well his tribute to Islam in the 50th issue of the Sandman could contradict the whole notion he supported feminism. But you can't expect most leftists to consider the possibilities. This article, however dampens the impact when it brings up J.K. Rowling:

“Tattooing has always kind of had a bit of a fandom element,” says Thomas O’Mahony, the London-based co-host of the podcast Beneath the Skin, which explores history through the art of tattoos, along with Dr. Matt Lodder, a senior lecturer at the University of Essex who specializes in the field. O’Mahony mentions how 17th-century pilgrims would get tattoos of “the Coptic cross in Jerusalem, as a proof of pilgrimage, and what is the biggest fandom if not the fandom of Jesus?” Pop culture has always been well-represented in the tattoo medium. In the 1920s, O’Mahony says, artists were “taking designs from Disney cartoons, stuff like Steamboat Willie, very early cartoons. Tattooing, a lot of it is directed by what consumers want.”

But Gaiman is one of those figures who seems to particularly lend himself to tattoo culture, O’Mahony says. “I think there’s a level of parasociality that has been engendered through his work,” he says. “Like, if you look at traditional authors, no one’s really getting a tattoo of Stephen King. They might be getting a tattoo of the works that he’s created, but there’s a primacy of the author in Gaiman’s works — he’s so present in them.” As a bestselling and highly recognizable author, O’Mahony feels Gaiman might be more comparable to a rock star (and musicians have certainly inspired many regrettable tattoos in their own right). A more literary precedent for the Gaiman situation might be J.K. Rowling, whose ceaseless transphobia in recent years has led countless fans to remove or cover up their once meaningful Harry Potter tattoos.

This is just what the Times of India was talking about. The double-standard on the left when it comes to LGBT ideology. Why does the RS writer think that's so much more important than women's safety? Also note how Rowling's experience with sexual assault is ignored in this piece, and that says quite a bit about how this article flubs. If Gaiman suddenly took up such an identity as transsexuality, chances are quite a few leftists would be voicing less concern over the scandal than they are now, assuming they even covered the case at all.

None of this will stop tattoo enthusiasts from continuing to request designs explicitly tied to fallible artists and celebrities, O’Mahony says. “You look at a lot of public figures that are adored from like the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, a vast majority of them have done objectionable things,” he points out. “People aren’t [necessarily] attached to the person. They’re attached to the idea the person represents.” Perhaps you could say that even while Gaiman is seeing his TV and movie adaptation deals canceled, and bookstores are weighing the idea of pulling his titles off the shelves, the fans most passionate about his fantasy worlds can’t erase him from existence in quite the same way. After all, he changed their lives — and the proof is right there for anyone to see.

Well it wasn't in a good way he did. The darkness he emphasized is all that's wrong with modern storytelling, seeing how it's become such a sad staple in only so many places, along with other forms of wokeness. And he's never shown any remorse for corrupting and sullying the entertainment landscape with his overrated tales. This article does hint one of the most notable audiences Gaiman appealed to was punk subculture, and that's but one of the most annoying things about his resume.

RS isn't the only news source that's taken a double-standard by dragging Rowling into the whole mess. Popverse's Chris Arrant did something similar when he addressed the scandal:

"I never saw that side of Neil."

That's something we can all relate to. While we all have varying degrees of connection to Gaiman, the sexual assault allegations were compounded with the more recent reporting that some of the reported instances was done in the presence of one of his children. That added detail brings a whole other sense of dread and revulsion, especially for those with children - and even for those like me who don't have children, but have just simple empathy.

Neil Gaiman was the second author I ever dealt with professionally as a journalist. I was researching a story regarding a 'rumor' (which turned out to be fan speculation) of a specific new project he was working on with Marvel Comics. Using some sleuthing, I obtained his direct contact info and reached out - and surprisingly, he responded within the same day. A series of emails were exchanged, and I found the answers I needed to form the basis of the story.

That was a formative experience for me after becoming a fan of his work in the '90s, and it and further interactions as a journalist didn't refute that. But, as Tori Amos inferred, I didn't know all of Neil - and I certainly knew much less than Amos did. As a fan of someone I can never begin to truly know all the sides of someone; as a journalist, the same also applies.

In all of this, what it boils down to is a matter of trust: trust given to him by his friends and family, as well as those who work with him, and those who are (or were) fans of his work; even those of us who had professional dealings with Gaiman while also maintaining an appreciation for his work. Even if its a trust Gaiman didn't consciously give to me, it was a trust I bestowed that was later violated. Is the answer to never trust any celebrity again? That may seem drastic, but I'm finding more and more than you can bestow positive feelings on a celebrity figure without trust being among them.

As I've been prone to saying after previous things like this, just because I'm a fan of someone's work doesn't mean I'd trust them taking care of my cats. That's not that trust has been removed and they're no longer trustworthy to me, but in effect, trust is earned.

While it may be possible to separate the art from the artist and retain some modicum of enjoyment for Gaiman's work, I have not been able to do that. Through allegations against Warren Ellis, the facts surrounding J.K. Rowling, the flagrant actions of Mel Gibson, and going further back to the deeds of Woody Allen, I find myself giving less and less fucks. While I can admit that their works of which I was a fan of remain 'good' works in my mind, actions like these rob me of my ability to enjoy them, or even find them palatable at all.

Looks like Mr. Arrant's the 2nd person I know who's dragging an actual victim into the whole mess, along with veteran actor/director Allen, who was, at least for a few years, unfairly accused of sexual assault even though he had originally been cleared of wrongdoing by courts in the 90s, and no other known accusations ever turned up against him to date. Some performers have now expressed regret they tried to blacklist him. If there's no concrete evidence to support accusations against Allen, then to keep up this charade amounts to nothing more than absurd virtue-signaling. Arrant then asks:

What do I do with my Neil Gaiman books, and how do I engage with future works of theirs - or new adaptations of their works? The quick answer is to put it all in the bin and not to think about it. For me, though, I think its important to find a healthy way to engage and continue to write about things - not avoiding the difficult, but find a way to be able to communicate about it and all the facets of it.

Well at least he's not condoning book burnings, because something that nasty doesn't doesn't aid the situation any more than Gaiman's abominations. And amazing Arrant's willing to acknowledge that the whole notion Gaiman would commit his horrific acts while his infant son was present is also sickening. And on the subject of his children, Distractify notes that a daughter of his was named after a drag queen! Truly stupefying.

And I notice NPR's Glen Weldon is commenting on the scandal, about where he'll go from here as a "fan", and not very convincingly:

While we don't know whether these disturbing allegations are true, learning of them naturally leads to a deeply personal, complicated question: How do we deal with allegations about artists whose work we admire — even revere?

I should note: It's a complicated question for most of us. It's not remotely complicated for those who rush to social media to declare that they never truly liked the creator's work in the first place, or that they always suspected them, or that the only possible response for absolutely everyone is to rid themselves of the now-poisoned art that, before learning of the allegations against the creator, they loved so dearly.

Nor is it complicated for those who will insist that a creator's personal life has no bearing on how we choose to respond to their work, and that the history of art is a grim, unremitting litany of monstrous individuals who created works of enduring, inviolate beauty.

From this, it doesn't sound so much like he's willing to reevaluate whether the stories were any good to begin with, so much as whether he should keep it or trash it. What was so "beautiful" about Gaiman's work? The 14th and 17th Sandman issues, in example, were most definitely not, and as I said before, the way they were written was defeatist. There was one part early in the series that showed a character urinating on a wall. How is that "lovely"? Stuff like that is embarrassingly crude. Even his Marvel stories had distasteful elements. By the way, who's "we"? Assuming Weldon's a male feminist himself, doesn't he think we should "believe all women"? Is he questioning how several women who didn't know each other have come forward, and the case has reached critical mass? Tsk tsk. I vaguely remember one of the first issues had the caption, "listen" featured a few times. Tragically, Gaiman failed to do the same for any victim who protested his horrific assaults on them.

Most of us, however, will find ourselves mired in the hand-wringing of the in-between. We'll make individual, case-by-case choices, we'll cherry-pick from the art, we'll envision ourselves, in years ahead, sampling lightly from the salad bar of the artist's collected works, and feeling a little lousy about it.

Closing the door on an artist's future work

Here's my personal approach, whenever allegations come out about an artist whose work is important to me: I see the moment I learned of them as an inflection point. From that very instant, it's on me. The knowledge of the allegations will color their past works, when and if I choose to revisit them in the future. It won't change how those works affected me back then, and there's no point in pretending it will. But my newfound understanding of the claims can and will change how those works affect me today, and tomorrow.

To put that in practical perspective: If I own any physical media of their past work, I feel free to revisit it, while leaving plenty of room for the new allegations to color my impressions. But as for any future work — that's a door I'm only too willing to shut.

Take Gaiman. I have written and podcasted extensively on how Gaiman's The Sandman unlocked something in me — a love of big swing storytelling, of grand mythic themes and characters grounded in the everyday, of locating magic in the mundane. Should I ever go back and pull those graphic novels down from the shelf, I will remember my younger self marveling at how a series that began as a grisly little horror comic – one so indebted to the works of Stephen King that it felt usurious — could transform into an epic tale that used anthropomorphic representations of abstract concepts like Dream, Death and Desire to grapple with all-too human issues of family, alienation, guilt and duty. The act of reading it was like witnessing an artist shaking off his adolescent influences and finding his own, quietly assured voice.

That will never change. But with my understanding of the allegations so far, my giving him or his future work thought and attention — and, crucially, money — will change. It will end. A second season of Netflix's adaptation of The Sandman appears to be on the way, and I loved pretty much everything about the first. But I will be stepping away.

It's an arbitrary distinction, I admit. But choosing the moment I learned of the allegations against Gaiman as the dividing line between engaging with him and not is, importantly, a choice. It feels declarative, in a small way. The very tiniest of flags, firmly planted.

If he's willing to revisit Gaiman's earlier writings, he's not reevaluating. And based on the following, he's merely virtue-signaling:

I did the same thing with J.K. Rowling. Now, I was never as deeply connected to her work as I was with Gaiman's, but once she took to Twitter to launch into her weirdly spirited campaign against the idea that trans women are women, I decided she didn't need my support, going forward. The Hogwarts Legacy game sure looks fun, from the clips I see on TikTok. And I'd idly wondered if a trip to the Harry Potter theme park to score myself a wand might be worthwhile. But engaging with those properties could mean putting even more money into her pocket and represent an explicit affirmation of her rancorous positions. And for me, forgoing a game or a ride or a wand-choosing-the-wizard experience simply doesn't amount to anything like a sacrifice; it's almost literally the least I can do.

This is getting to be like a case of "3 strikes and you're out". Sounds like this leftist disgrace hasn't a care in the world that Rowling was a victim of sexual assault herself, and no respect for science and biology either. He doesn't even clearly explain what was so great about the Sandman series, or any other Gaiman writings, for that matter. I'm not convinced Weldon's saying anything he does altruistically. If he wanted to, I'm sure he could've spotted something wrong a mile away with Gaiman. But he was one of a shipload of real life J. Jonah Jamesons who's devoted much of his career to taking apart cohesion of moral values, and couldn't write his way out of the proverbial wet paper bag. Weldon once again comes off as nothing more than a virtue-signaler who's not willing to ask whether he's doing the right thing, and his attack on Rowling only proves he doesn't have what it takes to defend women's dignity. As far as "guilt" is concerned, he evidences none of that. Or, he shows no signs of Buyer's Remorse when it comes to Gaiman's Sandman series, and I doubt he'll do that in the years to come. "A little lousy"? Sure. Also note how Weldon's willing to make use of a social media site owned by China's commies that may be unavailable for a while now in the USA. Let's also consider that from this point onward, Gaiman's career is pretty much over, and no further books are likely to be published or adapted. So it's pretty laughable for Weldon to say he'll keep the past writings on his shelves while avoiding future ones. Weldon's little more than a cure for insomnia, and he owes Rowling an apology.

Inverse says there's just no good way to adapt Gaiman's writings anymore, but they make the same flub, and at the beginning:

“Works belong to the fans, not the artists” has been the rallying cry when creators get “canceled.” There is an argument for that, as stories can grow and morph through fan works even after a project is released. However, there are exceptions to that rule. For example, even though the Harry Potter fandom has outgrown J.K. Rowling and her transphobic views, HBO is still planning to adapt her books into a series, and in doing so, they put more money into her pocket and indirectly condone her behavior.

Groan. This obsession with dragging Rowling into the mess is getting tiresome already, and again puts the sincerity of the columnists in doubt. Still, what's the following they say later on:

But despite those consequences, Gaiman still has multiple projects in the works. Season 2 of The Sandman is expected to premiere on Netflix sometime this year, and Prime Video is adapting his 2005 novel Anansi Boys into a miniseries. Both of these projects have wrapped filming, but at this point, it may be best to cut the losses — and ties with Gaiman — and shelve the shows entirely.

I don't expect them to receive high ratings after New York Magazine's expose, and for now, the network will probably release them with little fanfare in the end. And for the millionth time, what's so special about dark stories with grisly elements? Nobody's asking what should be a challenging query.

A writer at Vox also commented, and comments on how another male feminist has been unmasked:

The faux-feminist man who is accused of being a secret predator is by now, after the revelations of the Me Too movement, a familiar figure. A few years ago, when Me Too was raging through Hollywood, former liberal darlings Louis C.K. and Joss Whedon saw their whole legacies re-evaluated after being accused of sexual misconduct on C.K.’s part and bullying on Whedon’s. (Whedon has denied all the allegations.) Now, two new famous feminist men have been accused of gendered misconduct — but these revelations come at a moment when our culture appears to be far less interested in performing a reckoning.

The most serious of the new stories are the accusations against Neil Gaiman, a prolific and beloved figure in the fantasy and comic book world. Gaiman built his career on the idea that he was an ally to women, but last year, a podcast from the UK-based Tortoise Media accused him of physical and emotional abuse and sexual assault. Now, those claims have been amplified by a deeply reported and detailed feature in New York magazine alleging that Gaiman abused multiple vulnerable young women over whom he was in a position of power. Gaiman, in a post on his website, maintains that his relationships with these women were consensual.

In other words, Gaiman just followed Whedon's example, albeit much more horrifically, and now stands to lose everything, deservedly.

The accusations against Gaiman are much more serious and violent than the accusations against Baldoni. Yet both men find themselves in the same familiar place we saw with other faux feminists. They built their public images on being “the good ones” in a misogynistic world: men who understood that other men were violent and untrustworthy, who seemed committed to doing the best they could not to fall into the same traps. Now, they stand accused of using those long-crafted images as public shields for their private misbehavior.

This sounds like an attempt to slam men in general, rather than argue whether education is poor for both men and women in terms of how to act civilly. That kind of ambiguous rhetoric is exactly what's wrong with feminism from a leftist viewpoint.

The question that remains is: What will happen to the feminist men who lose their feminist cred in this time of Me Too backlash? What was all that feminist capital worth to begin with?

Was it even altruistic to begin with? That's a query nobody seems interested in figuring out.

In his fiction, Gaiman appeared to be at least trying to walk the walk. He populated his books with powerful women who don’t suffer fools. He tackled subjects like sexual violence at a time when they felt taboo.

Even Gaiman’s fans could acknowledge that for all his effort, he wasn’t always all that good at writing women — he seemed reluctant to center them in most of his stories and was always writing detailed descriptions of their breasts. Still, most readers agreed that he was well-intentioned.

No, on the contrary, he was being soft on crime in his stories, as both the 14th and 17th Sandman issues strongly suggested, but nobody thinks to take a closer look to consider that. Why, if memory serves, when Morpheus prevented the obese rapist/killer from sexually assaulting the girl in the former, Dream said she belongs to no one, "except perhaps to herself." And just what did Gaiman mean by "perhaps"? It's like he couldn't help but slip in a stealth contradiction, implying he didn't really uphold respecting a woman's personal agency. No wonder the story hasn't aged well.

In this version of the story, Gaiman is no longer the male feminist trying his best and now and then falling short of perfection. No longer is he a man “doing what he can, both personally and in society, to improve things.” Instead, he is allegedly implicating his own son in acts of sexual violence. And he is using his male feminist persona not just as a shield but as bait.

This is why he must be kept far away from children in the forseeable future. Even Palmer will have a lot to answer for. What Gaiman did to his son was offensive in the extreme, and a humiliation to parenthood. This scandal must go to court.

Next, here's a writer at the New Statesman, another somebody who'd once been familiar with Gaiman, and is now disturbed by the revelations:

To get this photo, I volunteered to steward the event. My hope was that standing around for hours shepherding the endless line of people who wanted their books signed might grant me a few minutes at the end to tell Gaiman how much his books meant to me, how important they had been to the formation of my adolescent identity, how there were moments as an angsty teenager when I felt his words were all that was holding me together. It did. I got my photo, and my snatched two minutes of tongue-tied conversation. I told him I had no idea what I was doing and sometimes wondered if I’d ever figure things out. In my copy of American Gods, tattered to the point of destruction by dozens of rereadings, he wrote in red ink “Rachel, Believe!”

I don’t know how to reconcile that memory, that photo, with Lila Shapiro’s disturbing piece about Gaiman, published in the latest issue of New York Magazine. Over 10,000 words she alleges that Gaiman abused several women in incidents that span multiple decades, and claims that he used his fame to pressure vulnerable young women into non-consensual and violent sex. Gaiman denies the allegations and insists the incidents described were instances of BDSM sex between consenting adults.

Among other things, the investigation explores how some women may reframe traumatic incidents as consensual as a defence mechanism. It raises the question of how consensual a violent power dynamic can truly be when the dominant partner is a multi-millionaire superstar author in his sixties, and the submissive partner is a broke babysitter in her early twenties. In a lengthy statement posted to his website, Gaiman said that the New York Magazine piece described “moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen. I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.”

The allegations against Gaiman have sent shockwaves through his fanbase – even a sense of betrayal. The sci-fi and fantasy writer is perhaps best known for the comic-book series The Sandman, and his novels Good Omens and American Gods. The Ocean at the End of the Lane won Book of the Year in the 2013 British National Book Awards. In 2015, Gaiman guest-edited an issue of the New Statesman magazine. He championed the rights of refugees, women and LGBTQ+ people on social media. He was celebrated as a feminist hero among many of his readers for his fiction’s depictions of vulnerable women.

But did anybody ever notice the lenient approach he took to the evil figures seen in the 14th and 17th Sandman stories, in example? I just don't comprehend how that never occurred to anybody years before. Speaking of refugees, if he sides with illegal immigration, including Islamofascists infiltrating once safe countries with civilized values, that's disturbing too. In fact, where were pseudo-feminists like Gaiman during the Rotherham scandal? Today, he's disqualified himself from commenting regardless.

And he was married to Amanda Palmer, the punk cabaret musician known for her raw, confessional music and the intimacy she cultivated with her fans. She would talk and sing openly about her own experiences with sexual assault. The online community she built was a safe space for recovering survivors, who found catharsis in her lyrics. One of her better-known songs, “Oasis”, describes a woman getting an abortion after being date-raped at a party. When she married Gaiman in 2011, their fanbases merged and an air of chaotic bohemian romance settled around them. For a decade, the couple had a kind of cult status for angsty nerdy misfit kids – and then angsty nerdy misfit adults – like me. There’s a photo of 22-year-old me with Palmer too: snapped in the aftermath of a gig, when she started playing impromptu ukelele songs on the steps of the theatre, straight after I told her how her music had helped me.

But before I ever heard her music I fell in love with his words. I discovered Gaiman’s books when I was at my most impressionable. I’d traipse across London following the path of Neverwhere; the first sex scenes I ever read were from American Gods. Of course, I was hardly alone in the pedestal I placed him on. Unusually for an author, let alone a sci-fi and fantasy author, Gaiman had rock-star status among readers in the 2000s and 2010s. One woman flew to the Cambridge book-signing from the US. She wasn’t a student, but a fan, desperate to see him in the flesh.

There was no shortage of women who would have volunteered to have consensual BDSM affairs with Neil Gaiman. The allegations in Shapiro’s piece describe something different: deliberate abuse of power, of degradation, where the thrill is not in the depravity of the acts themselves but seemingly in forcing them on someone unwilling but unable to say no, then goading them into retrospectively reframing their reluctance as enjoyment. Anyone in the kink community will tell you that an experience of such a nature is not BDSM, that any pressure or ambiguity over consent automatically turns risqué play into straight-up abuse.

The way Gaiman wrote his characters, you felt sure that he knew the difference between the two. As a teenager who felt damaged and broken and uniquely alone in the darkness (as all teenagers do), I remember how his books felt so safe. Which is odd, because there is nothing safe about them. The books, short stories and Sandman comics are full of disturbing scenes of sexual violence – men who dehumanise and brutalise women, men who fetishise little girls, men whose innermost desires have twisted them up inside and turned them into monsters. Yet it never seemed gratuitous, never seemed akin to the mindless torture porn in the likes of Game of Thrones. “Although his books abounded with stories of men torturing, raping, and murdering women, this was largely perceived as evidence of his empathy,” writes Shapiro. Yes, but it was more than empathy. Somehow it felt like whatever you might have suffered, he was on your side.

Today, it's clear he never was. But the comics he wrote weren't gratuitous? That's disputable, considering there were several very violent moments that were alienating, and gave adult entertainment a bad name. Now, since we're on the subject of Rowling, the Times of India says she's had what to say about Gaiman's non-apology:

JK Rowling took another dig at British author Neil Gaiman on Wednesday after the rape accused released a statement denying the sexual harassment allegations by eight women.

"Grok, show me an example of DARVO," wrote Rowling on X, sharing a screenshot of Gaiman's statement on the rape charges.

What is DARVO?

DARVO, which stands for 'Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender,' is a manipulative tactic that abusers may employ to avoid taking responsibility for their actions and to discredit their victims. This tactic involves denying any wrongdoing, attacking the credibility of the survivor, and reversing the roles of victim and offender.

When using DARVO, the abuser may claim that they have not done anything wrong and instead portray themselves as the victim of abuse. This role reversal can create confusion and make it challenging for others to determine the truth.

By employing this tactic, abusers aim to shift the blame onto the survivor and avoid facing the consequences of their actions. DARVO can be a powerful tool for manipulation, as it can cause survivors to doubt their own experiences and make it more difficult for them to seek support or justice.

The late Canadian author Alice Munro's 2nd husband, Gerald Fremlin, did something like that to her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner, and it's definitely offensive. Shame on Gaiman for pulling that act too.

Now, from Yahoo Life, they've commented on the subject of celebrities betraying the trust of fans, and at the end, there's the query of whether we can separate the art from the artist:

Many fans grapple with the question of whether they can still enjoy the work of their former favourite artist or celebrity without supporting or condoning their behaviour.

Beedon says that the process of separating the art from the artist is "deeply personal", with no right or wrong way of doing so.

"One strategy is to reflect on why the artist’s work resonates with you - is it the themes they touch on, characters they portray, or moral messages they deliver?" she says. "By focusing on these elements, you might find it easier to appreciate the art independently of the person behind it."

But many people feel conflicted about continuing to engage with an artist’s work - particularly if they stand to profit from it. In this case, Beedon advises setting personal boundaries.

"You might choose to enjoy their work without financially contributing to them, or you may decide to step away altogether. Whatever your choice, it should align with your values and comfort level."

She adds: "Ultimately, navigating this situation requires compassion - for yourself, for others grappling with similar feelings, and for the complexity of human imperfection."

A better question can be whether the "art" in focus was any good to begin with. At least a few of the scribes I know of in comicdom who've been accused of sexual misconduct, like Gerard Jones, seemed more interested in pushing leftist agendas along with their disturbing stealth sexual references than in actually turning out something intelligent. Those stories, for the most part, were pretty bankrupt creatively, and Gaiman's are little different. A writer at USA Today raised the issue too, while noting that she'll have a hard time watching Coraline again:

He is far from the first admired celebrity to be accused of sexual abuse, and it can be painful for fans to learn that a notable figure may not be who they thought they were. After taking it all in, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “How can I watch 'Coraline' again?”

The article was meant to be uncomfortable. Why?

Graphic recounts of sexual abuse grab — and hold onto — readers' attention.

Nicole Bedera, author of "On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence," says most readers are responding in a similar way, which is by asking themselves, “Is this bad enough that I have to stop being a fan of this man?”

IMHO, yes, it's that bad, and even before what's known about Gaiman came to light, I don't see what all the fuss was about regarding his comics and books.

“That’s part of why a lot of journalists will write these articles to be so graphic,” she explains. “Because if they’re not graphic, people are pretty quick to separate the art from the artist and try to keep supporting this person.”

On this, the main problem is that, if the offender is being paid residual bonuses for sales of the product, that's why it's a bad idea to continue making purchases that can put money in his pocket.

And Bedera cautions that graphic recounts can sensationalize sexual violence and raise the bar for what people consider to be violent enough to withdraw their support.

In her research on college sexual violence perpetrators, she found that school officials were less likely to intervene on violence that seemed more ordinary. “They would say things like, ‘He’s no Harvey Weinstein,’” she explains.

And, misogynistic fans can create a cult-like following behind celebrities who are accused of shocking violence.

“If you’re responding with disgust, there are misogynistic readers who are responding with awe, and that’s how that new fandom can be created,” Bedera says.

Can you separate art from the artist?

The short and clear answer is no, Bedera says.

Most certainly not when the work was pretentious and gruesome to begin with. As for universities with lenience, good grief, could these be the same ones that allow anti-Israel violence to run rampant? Well, if racism can rule a roost, it only figures misogyny can too, and vice versa.

Bedera recommends people look to other creators the artist has worked with and even their victims, who sometimes are artists themselves. In diverting your attention and financial resources from the person who has been accused of abuse, you can “help keep this person from becoming more powerful and maybe chip away at the power they already have."

For me, my connection to “Coraline” was never about Gaiman himself. When I first watched the film 15 years ago, I’m not sure I even knew it was based on his book.

So it’s unlikely that I’ll burn my copy of “Coraline” or delete the photos posing with my pink and yellow birthday cake — the damage has already been done.

But the next time “Coraline” returns to theaters, as it has the past two summers, I’ll save the $20, and stop convincing all my friends to go with me.

Outlook asked the questions too:

The allegations against the famed fantasy writer raise a fundamental question: What to do when a filmmaker or a theatre personality whose work I am fond of and who has been accused of sexual misconduct by using their positions of power—the fame of an artist—releases a new work, while victims continue to fight for justice? Should I boycott the movie/play then?

Again, this is particularly necessary if we don't want to finance the felon. And if you want a perspective of Coraline itself that's eyebrow raising, try this item at Vigilant Citizen, which points out how it builds on allusions to sadism, and one of the commenters asks: "And what of the white balloons in the garden at the end? Is this a symbol of sexual abuse victims?" And this all first came up 11 years ago! As a result, those who looked into this film stumbled onto something without realizing it, to be sure. That aside, somebody needs to ask the onetime fans of these movies what's so special about darkness in their minds?

However, when Overland addressed the issue, they said at the end:

The horrifying violence and abuse that Scarlett Pavlovich describes is not the result of an individual man’s monstrosity. It isn’t even the result of some innate, absolving, universal “human nature”. Scarlett Pavlovich endured what she endured because capitalism in New Zealand worked hard to make sure that she did. A rich man can rape a poor woman in a bathtub and, in some way, get some twisted satisfaction from doing so. But the rich — all of the rich, every last one — directly financially benefit from having built a world in which poor women have no choice but to submit to being raped. This misogynist violence is the premise of capitalist society, and ending that violence will require us to end capitalism.

Oh, for crying out loud. Scapegoating capitalism will not solve these problems. That's not what led to this terrible case. It's leftism run amok, and this item otherwise ignores that Gaiman's one of the most boilerplate leftists around. To act like socialism's throughly incapable of bad influence doesn't help matters. But, one can only wonder what the writer thinks of say, George Soros, considering how wealthy he is. Ross Douthat at the NY Times makes a somewhat better argument:

No, where the system breaks down, when bad things happen, it’s because of a failure to establish appropriate parameters, or a refusal to abide by the therapeutic rules — even when, as with the allegations against Gaiman, the entire surrounding story underscores just how hard it can be to constrain a predator’s behavior or litigate the murky landscape of power and desire.

I think what's really needed is better education, and to convincingly oppose these religious cults that've only resulted in these atrocious failures of morality.

We Got This Covered says his former fans aren't buying his shoddy defenses:

We should feel very sorry for Neil Gaiman‘s legions of devoted fans. For decades they thought they were championing a kind, supportive, feminist ally who regularly delivered imaginative, impressive gothic fantasies. Everything, from his writing to his online activity to his social circle, painted a picture of a genuinely lovely person.

Except maybe his social media posts, which could be pretty alienating, IMHO. And his fantasy tales were not impressive, because of how vapid they actually were. Yet nobody listened to any of the Cassandras who tried to point this out, until Gaiman was discovered doing something terrible behind the scenes.

Over the last six months that facade has come crashing down. First came a series of podcasts detailing Gaiman’s questionable sexual behavior, but this week’s publication of a lengthy exposé in New York Magazine drawn from the direct testimony of his alleged victims has left jaws on the floor. We won’t go into the precise nature of their stories here, but the general response has been shock, disgust, and outright horror.

Most of Gaiman’s predominantly liberal, feminist fanbase disowned him overnight. Signed books have been tossed in recycling, graphic novels donated to Goodwill, and we only have sympathy for those stuck with tattoos of his characters. [...]

It’s difficult to see a way back from this for Gaiman. The best-case scenario is that somehow his production partners in Netflix and Amazon shrug their shoulders and continue producing The Sandman and various other adaptations of his work. However, given the shocking nature of these women’s stories, we suspect some executives are mulling over writing off what’s already been spent as a tax break.

As for his future literary career? Well, if his fans are actively destroying the Gaiman novels they already own, it seems unlikely they’ll be rushing out to buy new ones. Though many would like to see criminal charges brought against him and compensatory payments to his alleged victims, it would ultimately be best for Gaiman and his work to simply fade away into obscurity. Here’s hoping karma is real.

Well considering the gravity of the accusations, that's why a court case would be recommended. Trouble is, as I realize, these "celebrities" are wealthy enough to hire lawyers who can keep the cases from reaching a hearing for years. The court of public opinion, however, can be a greater form of punishment. And it's to be hoped more people who've taken note of the news will be voting with their wallets and not buying Gaiman's overrated tommyrot anymore.

And Slate's talking about the end of male feminists, if Gaiman's crimes signal it:

And so Gaiman joins an ignominious crew of famous men whose work and statements seemed to align with women against sexist oppression in public, even as they allegedly assaulted, harassed, or otherwise mistreated women in private. This pathway is now so well trodden as to have become a trope: the male feminist who deeply, appallingly wasn’t.

At the height of #MeToo, these guys were everywhere. There was Louis C.K., who made searching, seemingly self-aware work that scrutinized gender relations and male sexual entitlement. And yet, several women have said that he masturbated in front of them without their permission or otherwise sexually harassed them. There was Aziz Ansari, who made sensitive, thoughtful comedy about heterosexual dating—and reportedly tried to pressure a woman into sexual contact with unceasing persistence after she repeatedly resisted. Then there was Eric Schneiderman, the New York attorney general who sued Harvey Weinstein’s company for creating a “toxic environment.” Months later, four women accused Schneiderman of physical violence, often during sex. (Schneiderman, like Gaiman, said he was practicing consensual BDSM.)

[...] When a man who seems generally enlightened in public is alleged to have mistreated women in private, there is a sense among his fans of having been duped. The reaction to such allegations is often accompanied by a question: Were his feminist bona fides part of the reason his accusers trusted him in the first place? No matter how many men like Gaiman are hit with troubling allegations, it’s still hard for supporters of male “feminist” creators to internalize that speaking out against gender inequities doesn’t preclude a man from being a jerk—or even a serial rapist.

There doesn't seem to be a sense among leftists that liberal ideology may be impeding upon the ability of these male feminists to recognize why abusive behavior is wrong. And, they seem too obsessed with railing against Donald Trump to be seriously concerned about sexism on the left side, as the following hints:

The adulation of male feminists has quieted a bit over the past several years, partly due to the rising intensity of threats to women’s lives in the Trump era. (Hearing a man say that women deserve equal treatment just doesn’t hit like it used to.) The label of feminist itself has also lost some of its currency. For a time, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, there was an fixation on getting celebrities to say whether they were feminists. Their answers could power entire news cycles. That black-and-white framing has, thankfully, mostly evaporated in popular discourse. Trump’s rise showed many progressive white women the error in approaching feminism as a narrow, single-issue movement having to do with gender alone. And the term began losing the thread when right-wing conservatives who oppose abortion access and promote traditional gender roles began calling themselves feminists.

If they think conservatives are far more of a problem than liberal male feminists, it's no wonder the problem of male pseudo-feminists will never be solved.

Per the Milkshake Duck meme and the admonition to “never meet your idols,” there is a broad understanding in adult society that human beings (and ducks) are complicated. They often hurt others—some number of them hurt others in particularly monstrous ways. The male “feminist,” as a figure of wish fulfillment in the search for a better world, has circumvented the natural skepticism people might otherwise have about public figures. Fan culture plays into this too: The world of comic cons and fan sites that Gaiman inhabits encourages obsessive parasocial relationships with media creators. In that milieu, it can be hard to remember that the public image of a celebrity is just a carefully crafted facade designed for maximum monetary gain. No matter what they post or how they write, we don’t really know these people at all.

And by the end of the decade, Gaiman will likely have been reduced to but a tedious footnote.

Labels: golden calf of LGBT, history, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics

Superhero Hype announced what DC, in example, is offering for Free Comic Book Day, including one dark item and another that omits a certain notable Green Lantern from the Silver Age:

This Absolute Universe story will be written by Jeff Lemire, with art by Giuseppe Camuncoli and Stefano Nesi. Set in this particularly dark DC alternate reality, the story will center around a gathering evil. [M]eanwhile, a mysterious figure with unclear intentions reveals an interest in the new Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman of this reality. [...]

In addition to the DC All-In/Absolute Universe special, DC is offering two books aimed at young readers. The first is a special Free Comic Book Day preview of Superman’s Good Guy Gang. The new graphic novel, aimed at early readers ages 5-7, features a script and art by Rob Justus. The story will find a young Superman trying to form a team with Hawkgirl and the Green Lantern Guy Gardner. The full book goes on sale July 1, 2025.

It's appalling they continue to perpetuate the culture of darkness, and while I think Guy Gardner's got potential as a character if written well, it's becoming laughable at this point how GLs like him are being cast in these stories instead of Hal Jordan. The choice reeks of editorial mandate, and it's regrettable how Hal continues to be marginalized. All that aside, I wouldn't be fooled into taking home the items from DC/Marvel as they stand today, and hope there's independent publishers with something better to offer, and that includes stuff that's more optimistic.

Labels: dc comics, Green Lantern, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, sales

The Hollywood Reporter says the dreadful writer who wrote a whole worthless decade of Spider-Man, including the part where Peter Parker was mind-switched with Dr. Octopus, is now moving over to DC to work on a Superman book that's apparently tied in with the new direction for the movies:

Dan Slott, the Eisner-winning writer who has been the guiding force for Spider-Man stories at Marvel Comics for close to 15 years, has gone across the street to DC.

Slott, who has been signed to an exclusive contract with Marvel since the late aughts, will make his DC debut with Superman Unlimited, writing the monthly comic that will be drawn by Rafael Albuquerque, the artist and co-creator of the award-winning horror comic American Vampire. DC announced the news Thursday.

The title will be a driving force in a company-wide initiative named “Summer of Superman” that ties into James Gunn’s Superman film. The inaugural feature from Warner Bros. Discovery arm DC Studios opens July 11. [...]

The comic will kick off with a hook of cosmic proportions: a Kryptonite asteroid showers Earth with the mineral that weakens the man of Steel, changing the balance of power in criminal empires in Metropolis and the planet. “To survive, Superman will need to forge new alliances, new tech and new tactics if he hopes to carry on his quest for truth, justice and a better tomorrow!” the announcement exclaimed.

Well. It sounds like they're perpetuating the work of previous modern propagandists, forcibly jettisoning the use of The American Way slogan for the sake of one they're unlikely to prove capable of providing a convincing direction for. IGN says the following about the premise:

“We just launched Justice League Unlimited in the fall, and Mark Waid and Dan Mora are telling a tale of unlimited Super Heroes in that ongoing series,” continued Kaminski. “In contrast, Slott and Albuquerque’s Superman Unlimited is a tale of unlimited Super-Villains that are super-charged by Kryptonite. Green K is everywhere. Superman is going to need to get to work and adapt to survive. Every line of Dan’s pitch is packed with surprises and every line Rafa draws is stunning… 2025 is truly going to be Superman UNLIMITED.”

It won't be shocking if villains get a huge emphasis here, in a way that amounts to little more than cheap celebration. Also notice the artist is known for penning a horror comic. That's not exactly a great fit for the optimism the Man of Steel was once built upon, before all the woke pandering of recent brought it down in the worst ways possible. When a writer as bad as Slott is at the wheel, one can only expect something worthless.

When writers and aritsts like these are at the helm, the year won't be a good one for Superman.

Labels: bad editors, dc comics, dreadful artists, dreadful writers, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, Superman